October 20

This is the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. - Genesis 28:17.

THE house of God and the gate of heaven are most intimately related; and Jacob mentions them together, and in their proper order: “This is the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” The one precedes the other; the one affords us the earnest and foretaste of the other. Philip Henry was accustomed to say, at the close of his Sabbath-days’ exercises, “Well, if this be not heaven it is the way to it.” Not that the house of God and heaven are inseparably connected; far from it.

Alas! there are many who will find the word preached the savour of death unto death; and others the savour of life unto life. There are some who will find the Saviour displayed there as a destroyer, while others will find him their Redeemer; while some regard him as “a precious corner-stone,” some make him “a stone of stumbling, over which they fall and are broken,” and “are snared and taken.” To some, alas! the house of God will be found the gate of hell too. How many have passed through the sanctuary as through a gate into perdition!

Oh, the remembrance of the pulpit, the desk, and the figures of the ministers who have addressed them, and the tones of their voices, and the various sermons they preached, these will furnish the fuel to the fire that is unquenchable, and the food to the worm that dieth not. But to many others the house of God will be the gate of heaven. Those who call the “Sabbath a delight, the holy of the Lord,” will enjoy an eternal Sabbath; they who can now say, “I have loved the habitation of thy house, and the place where thine honour dwelleth,” shall “serve him day and night in his temple” above, never more to go out. We should live in the expectation of this.

The Saviour is set forth as a ladder to teach us that when we have done with time we shall ascend to heaven. Some of the Lord’s people are near the top, and are about to set their feet on the last step; while others are grasping some of the lower rounds. Let us take a firm hold, and be persuaded that we shall receive eternal life as God’s free gift through Jesus Christ; that he who now is giving grace “will give glory, and no good thing will he withhold from them that walk uprightly.”

To all who are convinced of sin, and, renouncing self, who are rejoicing alone in Christ Jesus, and are giving themselves up to him at the foot of the cross, and are saying,

“No joy can be compared with this,

To love and serve the Lord,”

there is not a promise in the book of God which does not belong to them. Though for awhile they may be troubled through manifold temptations, he will soon take them out of the furnace, and place them beyond the possibility of further trial: “For when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.”